In
Jonathan Keats' book on art forgers, the San Francisco art critic recounts how
in 1917 art critics loved Han van Meegeren’s first exhibit of his
paintings; however, five years later critics panned van Meegeren’s exhibit of
biblical paintings (personally I blame Cézanne for modernism in art).
Keats writes:

Though the gallery found buyers for van
Meegeren’s virtuoso depictions of the young Christ teaching in the Temple and
the supper at Emmaus, his earnings could hardly compensate for the injury to
his reputation.

Van
Meegeren would revisit the subjects of these paintings in two pivotal moments
of his life. He created and sold Supper at Emmaus as a Vermeer, then, after
accused of collaborating with the Nazis by selling a Dutch masterpiece to
Goering, he confessed to his forgeries. Had van Meegeren forged art to mock art
experts or did he just want to make more money? After all, Keats writes:

Van
Meegeren was well compensated for this work [‘flattering portraits of the upper
crust’], generating an income that many avant-garde artists would have
envied. But in the early 20th century, no modern painter
could command prices comparable to the old masters. Picasso earned
approximately $5,000 for a major canvas in the ‘20s. By comparison, The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals sold for
approximately three times that amount – and it was a counterfeit. The
painter? Han van Meegeren.

The
counterfeit Laughing Cavalier was painted in 1922, two years before van Meegeren’s second
exhibit met the disdain of art critics and years before he sold five Vermeer
paintings. In a 1937 issue of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Abraham
Bredius, the former director of The Hague’s Mauritshuis Museum,
praised [van Meegeren’s] the newly discovered Supper at Emmaus as the ‘masterpiece of
Johannes Vermeer of Delft.’ Keats writes of van Meegeren’s forgery success:

On the
strength of the laudatory text, and the author’s eminence, the Museum Boijmans
in Rotterdam acquired the painting for 520,000 guilders – approximately $3.9
million today – and made The Supper at Emmaus the
centerpiece of a blockbuster exhibition on the golden age.

Conversation Piece, The Smiling Girl, Lace Maker, and a Portrait of a Girl
with a Blue Bow were four paintings made by van Meegeren and sold as Vermeer
paintings. Art dealer Joseph Duveen sold The Lace Maker and The Smiling Girl to Andrew
Mellon. Keats writes about how the forger fooled the art experts:

In other
words, the connoisseurship exploited by van Meegeren was the very basis of
Vermeer’s art historical resurrection. The authority he abused may have
been venal and vainglorious – and jealously hostile to scientific verification
– but there was no substitute for it. Gullibility was the underside of
open-mindedness.

Keats
recounts the van Meegeren’s arrest for collaborating with the Nazis, how he
subsequently diverted attention from his work for Hitler to confessing that the
paintings allegedly sold to Nazis had been counterfeit Vermeers. He then
participated in performance art by spending months in the former Goudstikker
Gallery creating another forgery, The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple, to show off his ability. The Dutch public was led to believe
that van Meegeren’s forgeries had resisted Nazi authority. The convicted forger
died before beginning his prison sentence. Keats writes:

For the
experts and critics, the verdict and consequences were more ambiguous.
Conveniently deceased before the trial, Abraham Bredius was universally
condemned as a fool, while the few experts who had not been tricked took the
opportunity to gloat. Most noisily, the Duveen agent Edward Fowles
publicly released a telegram he’d secretly cable to Joseph Duveen after seeing
Emmaus in 1937: PICTURE A ROTTEN FAKE. When the New York Herald Tribune picked up his story, no
mention was made of the suspect Vermeers that Duveen had sold Andrew Mellon.

On the
other hand, Dirk Hannema refused to accept that Emmaus was a fake and spent the
rest of his life trying to establish its authenticity with funding from Daniël
van Beuningen. Though no credible scholars took Hannema’s research seriously
and he no longer had an official position at the museum, The Supper at Emmaus
remained on exhibit at the Boijmans – with no mention of who’d painted it –
until Hannema’s death in 1984.

The
unlabeled Emmaus was a fitting tribute for Han van Meegeren, who’d shattered
the authority that made him without fostering alternatives.

Van Gogh's Le Blute-fin Windmill and Dirk Hannema (AP)

However, Dirk Hannema's reputation did not end with his misidentification of van Meegeren's Vermeer forgery. Here's a link to a video about the controversial museum director's life in art connoisseurship and collecting (now at the Museum de Fundatie). Hannema spent years claiming that a painting of a windmill he'd purchased for 6,500 francs from a Parisian dealer was by Van Gogh -- and 25 years after his death the Van Gogh Museum authenticatedLe Blute-fin Windmill.